‘Young Girl Carrying a Pumpkin’ (‘Fior di Bosco’) is among the works that the Italian painter Fausto Zonaro painted two years before his arrival in Istanbul in 1891, and which he recorded as having brought with him from Italy. The young girl who is the subject of the painting recurs in other canvases and sketches by the artist; she may well have been an acquaintance of Zonaro’s, and the work’s Italian title, meaning ‘forest flower’ or ‘wildflower’, is likely to have been her nickname. The painting was sold on 20 October 1908 to Abdülmecid Efendi, one of Zonaro’s students, for 200 liras, a considerable sum at the time, and the sale was made on the condition that Zonaro would produce no copy of the work.
The painting is best considered alongside the series of works Zonaro produced during this period, all drawing on the rural life of the Veneto. In the same years he painted ‘La Coda del Diavolo’ (‘The Devil’s Tail’, 1886) and ‘Dopo il Gioco’ (‘After the Game’, 1887), later conceived as a complementary diptych; both works, too, are peopled with simply dressed Venetian girls in open-air settings. Zonaro brought all three paintings with him to Istanbul and showed them together at his final exhibition in Akaretler in 1908.
‘Young Girl Carrying a Pumpkin’ reflects the harmonious interplay of Naturalism and Romanticism that came to define the latter decades of the nineteenth century. The work is grounded in Naturalist principles, rendering both the human figure and the surrounding landscape with careful fidelity; in the attention Zonaro lavishes on the woman’s skin, the fall of her white dress, and the living textures of the foliage, the inheritance of nineteenth-century Realism is unmistakable. Yet the painting is equally possessed of a Romantic sensibility: the image of a barefoot, simply dressed woman moving through a tranquil, verdant garden evokes an idealised vision of rural life, untouched by the encroachments of industrialisation and the modern city. This inclination to discover grace in the peasant figure at one with the natural world places the work in the tradition represented by the French Naturalist painter Jules Breton (1827–1906), who brought peasant women to the canvas with a vision at once idealised and fundamentally honest, finding beauty not in stark documentary truth but in the quiet accord between human life and nature.
